Saturday, August 26, 2017

Summer Air

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I just read Caesar’s Last Breath, in which author Sam Kean
makes science writing as fun as anything else you’d bring to Limantour Beach for an enjoyable
summer read, with the difference that he imparts thought-provoking information
in addition to relaxing entertainment.

One of the chapters is about a gas we all take for granted, a component of the air all around us, called oxygen. It kind of jams my gears to imagine living in the vast span of
human history before oxygen was discovered, before its true nature was
precipitated out of the chaos of thousands of years of phlogiston and swirling human wonder. It’s
thought-provoking to be reminded that oxygen was discovered less than 250 years
ago, and it’s entertaining to read about the people and their experiments which
led to the discovery. Imagine trying to discover oxygen yourself. How would you
go about it?

Every schoolchild knows we need oxygen to breathe, to animate
our lives so we can do things like walk to Sculptured Beach at Point Reyes and take pictures of weird rock formations. It’s a rote fact that we don’t even stop to think about, but around the
late 1700s, as Kean writes, “[Antoine] Lavoisier had articulated the
connections between fire, oxygen, and breathing, declaring that breathing was a
sort of slow, controlled burning in our lungs. It remains one of the most important
chemical discoveries ever….”

Having already discussed nitrogen, which preceded oxygen’s introduction
to the Earth’s atmosphere, Kean continues farther down the page that, “Oxygen
and nitrogen are neighbors on the periodic table…, [b]ut if the buildup of
nitrogen a few billion years ago gave our planet its third and most benevolent
atmosphere, the arrival of oxygen inaugurated a fourth and much more explosive
regime. Whereas nitrogen is non-reactive to the point of being comatose, oxygen
is volatile, manic, a madman in most every chemical reaction. It actually
poisons many forms of life, and caused the greatest crisis that life on Earth
ever faced, the so-called Oxygen Catastrophe of two billion years ago….”

Wikipedia refers to this “catastrophe” a little differently.
On one hand oxygen’s arrival caused a mass extinction, but on the other hand, “the
Great Oxygenation Event alone was directly responsible for more than 2,500 new
minerals of the total of about 4,500 minerals found on Earth.”

I wonder which of the many minerals that make the geology of
Point Reyes so interesting owe their existence to the formation of oxygen some
2.5 billion years ago.

In Caesar’s Last Breath, Kean writes that “oxygen
destroyed early life because it detonates so easily inside cells; yet when life
learned how to control oxygen, that reactivity became its greatest asset.”
Continuing in a more arch vein, he continues, “And given how much havoc oxygen
has wreaked throughout history, it’s fitting that this element destroyed every
chemist who had a hand in its discovery. It’s the Hope Diamond of the periodic
table.”

A science book written with a novelist’s flair: now that's a breath of fresh air.